'Childless’ vs ‘Childfree’ 

People who want children but can’t have them sometimes use terms like Involuntarily Childless, Childless by Circumstance, and Childless Not by Choice. People who chose not to have children sometimes refer to themselves as Childfree, or Childfree by Choice.

These may seem like two very different categories but they do have some similarities. Here are some examples of the common ground amongst people without children:

• We may have experience of abortion, miscarriage and / or child death.
• We may feel like an incomplete or not fully functioning man or woman. We may feel isolated and unimportant, somehow adrift and rootless. 
• We may feel out of step with our contemporaries, who are having kids or grandchildren. We may miss our parenting friends, feeling like they’re always too busy or tired to be interested in us.  
• We may have to field intrusive and hurtful questions about our parenting status. We may be told insensitive things, like ‘you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘love’ until you’ve looked into the eyes of your baby’. People may suggest we’re selfish for not having kids. 
• We may worry about finding a partner, or worry that our relationship won’t survive not having children.
• Our workplaces may expect us to work late or through school holidays, to cover for our colleagues who have children. 
• We may worry about who’ll look after us as we get older, or who’ll advocate for us if we’re sick. We may not know who will plan our funeral, who to leave any inheritance to, or what our legacy will be. 
• We may wonder what to do with our lives if we aren’t raising children, and how to live what we consider to be a good life.  

So whether or not we have wanted and / or tried to have children, we may suffer from the lack of them at some stage of our lives. I support individuals who are struggling with any aspect of not having children, at any age.